in a lull, he struck out to the bush, and reached it
just as her ebbing strength gave way. He took her in his sturdy arms,
and, clinging with tooth and nail, stayed them both to their strange
anchorage. Faint, half conscious, disrobed as she was, in the sweet,
delicate features, the curve of the lip, and the raven tresses clothed
in seaweed, he recognized the Creole belle of last night's hop. He
cheered and encouraged her, pointing out that the storm was abating,
had abated. It could not be long until search-boats came, and while he
had strength to live she should share it. It proved true. Generous and
hardy fishers and ships had come at once to the scene of disaster, and
were busy picking up the few spared by wind and wave. They found the
two clinging together and to that slight bush, and took them off,
wrapping them in ready, rough fishermen's coats. The reader can see
the end of that story. A meeting so appointed had its predestined
end in a love-match. So we leave it and them: the rest of their lives
belongs to them, not to us.

The pair found by our fishing-smack were a wealthy planter and his
wife. For nine days of starvation and danger they had clung together.
When I think of the husband's manly care in thus abiding by the wife,
I find it hard to reconcile it with the fact that he only valued his
life and hers at a few dollars--not enough to compensate the traveler
for the loss incurred as demurrage to the fishermen.

Now Last Island is but a low sandy reef, on which a few straggling
fruit trees try to keep the remembrance of its bygone beauty. It is
as bare and desolate as the bones of those who filled its halls in the
cataclysm of that dreadful night--bones which now waste to whiteness
on sterile shores or are wrought into coral in the under-sea.

WILL WALLACE HARNEY.

[Footnote 1: The difficulty, I am aware, in venturing on a description
is, that it will appear rather a fever of fancy than an accurate
chromoscope. I can only point to the fact that the revelation of the
intense beauty of the sea has in recent years fallen rather to the
naturalist than the poet, the accurate and scientific prose of the
former surpassing the idealization of the latter.]

[Footnote 2: By recent provision the Chinese are
allowed to buy foreign vessels.]

POSEY'S NUGGET.

When the California "gold fever" broke out in the spring of 1849,
Doctor Hanchett was living at Clarksville in Southern Indiana. Doctor
Hanchett,